


Realizations

by pirategirljack



Category: 12 Monkeys (TV)
Genre: 12 monkeys theme week 2016, F/M, Fluff, accidentally in love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-11
Updated: 2016-07-11
Packaged: 2018-07-22 23:44:33
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,235
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7458276
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pirategirljack/pseuds/pirategirljack
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>12 Monkeys Theme Week 2016 - Day 1 - Jennifer</p><p>Deacon doesn't know what do to with all these feels.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Realizations

It happened suddenly, and Deacon wasn’t prepared for it.

They’d been traveling cross-country for weeks, everything was taking longer than it should have, and everyone kept sending him sideways looks to see if he was mad. He should have been. He knew he should have been. They didn’t have enough people since his boys had left, half of them were old scientists who had no practical use outside the lab, Ramse was not exactly being helpful in keeping his cool. But he wasn’t mad.

And it was because more than half the delays belonged to Jennifer.

She stopped for every lost child they came across. There were twelve of them now, and she was looking for a thirteenth because she didn’t like the way twelve looked. People were taking bets on how many others beyond thirteen she’d insist on.

She stopped for every lost woman they saw on the road, and almost as often for family groups and scav clans and anyone else who happened to have women. She smiled at all of them with her crazy, hopeful smile and offered every woman, young or old, tough or timid, a place with her Daughters. Their numbers had grown by almost a third, mostly useful ladies, and he wondered why he wasn’t more jealous that she was so successful with recruiting while his boys wandered off into the dark every night and he woke with less of them every morning. It reminded him of the good old days, when he was a king and he commanded hundreds, but the dynamic was different with this many women around.

And that’s when it hit him.

He liked her.

Jennifer Goines, yet another lunatic from the past come to save their shitty future--and this one was ACTUALLY insane...though her insanity did have a nice sharp edge of usefulness, and he found himself going along with her crazy plans more often than he shot them down, and even then it was usually just to help her figure a way around something she didn’t know she needed to figure a way around. She was smart, and snappy, and relentlessly positive, and learned fast, and really really liked shooting things--

And he was falling in love with her.

And he was still drinking himself numb at night to stop thinking about Cassie.

Shit.

And worse than that, there were two points to consider: one, that he now knew both love and what happens when it fails, and could never go back to being as coldhearted and calculating about these things as he was before, and two, that he was the reason Jennifer was going to die some day, and the fact that for him, it had already happened and he hadn’t known who she was or what she’d mean didn’t make it better.

If anything, both those points made it worse.

So he decided never, ever to say anything about it, ever.

Which lasted about three days.

“What’s the deal, Breakfast Club? You’re acting weirder than a very weird thing being weird. Dish.”

“Don’t you have some Daughters to tend to or something?”

“See? That’s what I’m talking about! Everything was peachy-keen, then WHAM, brick wall, shut it down. Nothing to see here, move along, distract from the pain, never mind the very tall man feeling sorry for himself in the corner.” She grabbed the bottle of whiskey from his hand, took a swig, coughed, and handed it back like it was suddenly too hot to keep. “Ugh, disgusting, not smooth at all! How can you drink that stuff?”

“What else is there?”

“Uh, like, anything at all that doesn’t taste like kerosene?”

He should stop talking. Instead, he said, “There’s not a lot of professionally filtered alcohol around these days, and I seem to have misplaced my still.”

It was getting dimmer outside. They were in a clear spot between red storms--something he’d thought, after the Facility, didn’t exist anymore--but the wind was picking up and he wondered if they were going to lose this patch of calm, too. Jennifer turned her head, as if listening, then shook it, just a little, as if she’d wondered, too, and knew better now. He tried not to look at the line of her neck over her scarf.

She turned back to him and tilted her head a little as she studied every inch of him. It was a look he was used to leveling on people before he shot them in the face or stabbed them in the back--sometimes literally--but she didn’t look like she wanted to kill him. She looked like he was a puzzle she wanted to solve.

“The voices keep chattering about some really confusing love stories that haven’t happened yet.”

He choked on his drink and decided to put it away after all.

“What?”

“You’ve got the scar. You’ve got the look. You’ve got the self loathing that’s like catnip for all the ladies.” Closer still. “You even say my name right, so the voices shut their faces for a second so I can think.”

“Jennifer--”

“Yeah, like that.” She was almost purring. He was way too close to doing something stupid.

“You’re mistaken.”

She smiled that huge, lit-from-within smile, giving him whiplash with the shift in mood. “Only one other person in the world says my name right, and he’s the same problem you have, he likes the wrong person. We’re the same, ScavKing, King of the Scavengers, though we’ve met kind of a LOT of scavengers that don’t seem to know they have a king from the number of them that keep shooting at us. “I was unaware we had a king, I thought we were an autonomous collective!” So rude. You’d think--” She shook herself and looked back at him, her fingers coming up toward his face. He was sitting, so she was taller than him for probably the only time since they’d met, her face and her fingers pale in the dimming light inside his tent.

He wanted to stand up and walk away, but he didn’t. He wanted to stand up and move closer, but he didn't do that, either. Once burned, twice shy. Her fingers barely brushed his cheekbone, and she traced the new scar from above his eyebrow down his cheek with the gentlest touch he’d felt in decades. No one ever offered gentleness to a murderer.

She was still an arm’s-length away, stretching almost too far to touch him. 

“We’re the same,” she said again, and her eyes were so deep and so sad. And then she pulled her hand back, and turned to leave. “We’ll find you some better booze. In the morning, we’re veering north to avoid another storm, and it’s going to take us into a city.”

Deacon didn’t say anything, but he didn’t have to, because she’d already gone. But he knew now that it didn’t matter where she led, he’d follow, and he’d be fine with it. What use was being a king with no people and no queen? Better to follow her, even if she led him into the very heart of hell. 

But, he thought, as he touched his own cheek where her cold fingertips had been, he didn’t think it would be hell. He thought it would be quite a bit better than that.

Confusing love stories that haven’t happened yet.

Deacon though the could handle that.


End file.
